“Treat everyone the same,” said mum. “It doesn’t matter if they’re a boy or a girl, or what colour their skin is, you treat them the same.”

There is no simpler, more fundamental piece of advice a parent could give a child. By my youth in the 80s the tenets of enlightenment liberalism had sunk their tendrils deep enough into the zeitgeist that even dear old mum espoused them as received wisdom.

She was right, of course (homosexuality being far enough removed from Melbourne’s deep south-east that sexuality didn’t come up in conversations about equality). Most kids take such easy homespun wisdom as a given early on, and the ideas take. This particular idea certainly did in my instance.

Of course, growing up in Melbourne’s outer(ish) suburbs, one necessarily encountered that particular brand of suburbanite racism. My mother’s was the type whose racism generally extended to speeding up alongside someone whose driving was not apparently up to snuff to ensure that her unspoken assumptions as to their ethnicity were correct, at which point we’d see her nod with satisfaction, and return to her diet of Neil Mitchell and continual low-level road rage.

So it was that as a mid-teen, Pauline Hanson emerged on the scene. I hadn’t thought too hard about her in the intervening decades, to be honest, as I preferred to consider her an aberration, a one-off where one of the nastier elements of the Liberals’ right wing lucked into the lower house, caused a ruckus, gave the media some cheap eyeballs, and then retreated into circus sideshow quasi anonymity forevermore.

Her reappearance has, however, brought back a lot of the thoughts a nascently political being had had in 1997. Particularly through the prism of mum.

We live in binary times — Obama’s a saviour or a war criminal. You’re an ally, or an enemy. Oz Faruqi is always trolling, or always wrong. In such times, ‘racism’ is an all-in proposition. One racist utterance — even the perception of one — and one can be easily tarred across social media (or the media, there’s little difference for most these days) as “a” racist. But my mum isn’t — wasn’t — a racist. She was certainly capable of racist thoughts, words and actions, though.

And I think about that basic lesson she taught me, that I took on so earnestly, and yet, it emerged, we interpreted in different ways.

“Treat everyone the same” is, to me, a call for empathy, a cri de coeur to consider others’ needs, and attend to them. Or at least, again, that’s how a youthful (now less youthful) me considered it.

So it was incredibly weird to teenaged me to hear mum say things like “well, she does make a few good points,” somewhat out the corner of her mouth, about Hanson.

The tone mum adopted said to me that she knew, at least a bit, that agreeing with Hanson positioned her somewhat against this basic childhood lesson. But at the same time, why should we be letting Asians in so freely, when that might harm people already here? Why should Aboriginal people get ‘extra’ welfare? Our notions of fairness, of ‘treating each other the same’ were apparently different.

But to mum, it probably meant exactly that. This notion of egalitarianism lies, I think, at the heart of Hanson’s appeal, and, I imagine, the heart of Hanson herself, when (if) she thinks particularly carefully about her beliefs and their effect on the body politic.

I don’t know if there’s a point here, beyond musing in a cold house on a cold night. I find myself in a moment of confused stasis — should we accommodate racism, hoping to change minds? Or should we oppose it, forcefully, stridently, calling racism racism and calling racists racists, even as we know that this is only likely to entrench our opponents deeper in the belief of their own righteousness?

To be racist — to think racist thoughts, to say racist words — is not what it was in 1950. People know racism is bad, but that simply means they can conquer the dissonance created by their own, our own, racist thoughts and feelings, often through flat denial.

I think I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, to little avail. I’ll call out racism, but try to avoid labelling people as racists. My mum, I genuinely believe, isn’t racist, but fuck me dead if she isn’t capable of thinking some incredibly racist shit now and then. I’ll just keep shaking my head sadly, like the disappointed son that I am, and hope that my quiet opprobrium will make her quietly reconsider.

Anyway, I feel better having typed this. Cheers.